A Messy Divorce In Bridgeport

December 12, 1991

Although the financially distressed University of Bridgeport has cut back its academic program severely, its troubles are far from over. The university is now on probation and may lose its accreditation from the New England Association of Schools and Colleges. The status of its thriving law school is also very much up in the air.

The Law Center, which has a healthy enrollment and a growing reputation, wishes to sever ties with the university. In the black, the center is the best asset in the university's bare cupboard.

The options are to continue to affiliate with the university, which would not necessarily help the law school; become a free-standing institution, which would be expensive, or affiliate with another institution.

The university's board of trustees directed the dean of the law school, Terence H. Benbow, to explore the third option. The board also appointed three incorporators whose mission would be to make the law school a separate legal entity, as it once was. Meanwhile the dean, who was talking with suitors, surprised university officials by recommending that the law school affiliate with Quinnipiac College in Hamden, an academically and fiscally sound four-year private institution.

What started out as an orderly process began to fall apart. The law school and the university went to court over control of endowment money. The university board began to get cold feet about giving up the law school. Should it give away its jewel? One university official said that the dean had no more right to sell the law school than to sell a stranger's car.

The dean was fired, but would not vacate his office. Then last week, he and officials from the university and Quinnipiac College made a joint presentation to the American Bar Association on the law school's proposed affiliation with Quinnipiac. In sum, there is confusion and embarrassment for the university.

The dissolution of a university, like the dissolution of a marriage, is not pretty. What will happen now? The university may still try to save itself by merging the whole operation, law school included, with another school. A prime candidate is Sacred Heart University -- a Roman Catholic college located in Fairfield. Such a deal would be unlikely without the law school.

Mr. Benbow maintains that he must think of his students and faculty and issues like accreditation first, not the good of a university that has essentially died. Maybe. But it is also common sense that every dean who is overruled can't simply secede.

Process matters. His goal is proper, but the dean got too far ahead of the university board as well as his own board, which hadn't yet met when he was fashioning a new marriage.

The duty of all administrators and trustees should be to do their best by the students in the university and the law school. Before anyone takes another step, he or she should think of that duty.